Serbs Say They Are Victims, Not Villains

BELGRADE, Yugoslavia — In conversations with Serbs across the social and political spectrum, the word that comes up again and again is "normal."

After almost a decade of war and deprivation, Serbs yearn to lead normal lives. They long to become a normal part of Europe. They want to be seen as normal human beings.

But normalcy is likely to elude the Serbs until they come to accept responsibility for what has been done in their name by their leaders.

There is no sign that this will occur anytime soon. Serbs cling to a version of history in which they are always the victims, never the villains. They draw from a deep well of historical grievance that dates back to 1389 when their medieval kingdom was conquered by the Ottoman Turks.

NATO's 10-week-long bombing campaign has only driven them deeper into the depths of their highly colored sense of victimization.

"We are the new Jews of Europe," asserted Vuk Draskovic, the Serbian opposition leader who has tried to position himself as a pro-Europe, democratic alternative to Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

Draskovic, a writer with half a dozen novels and plays to his credit, is a natural-born street politician with a theatrical flair. He was thrown in jail in 1993 for objecting to the Serbs' ethnic cleansing campaign in Bosnia.

At the war's start, he held the largely meaningless post of federal deputy prime minister, but was dismissed by Milosevic for suggesting a peace deal that would allow international troops in Kosovo -- pretty much the deal Milosevic was forced to accept last week.

For Draskovic to suggest an equivalency between the systematic extermination of 6 million Jews and the accidental deaths of perhaps a few hundred civilians by NATO bombs that went astray is absurd, but it is a good example of how Serbs, in their isolation, have come to see themselves and their plight.

"This is not a war," Draskovic said of the NATO air campaign. "This is one side doing all the killing. This is collective punishment. This is why I say we are the new Jews of Europe."

Official propaganda here repeatedly accused NATO of "genocide." When a missile hit a retirement home on May 31, killing about 20, it was "genocide against the elderly."

When another hit a hospital on May 19, killing three patients and a night watchman, it was "genocide against the sick." The same missile blew out the windows of a nearby maternity hospital. Fortunately, no one was killed, but according to Serbian Health Minister Leposava Milicevic, this was "baby genocide."

The Serbs hardly have a monopoly on propaganda and misinformation. NATO dished up plenty of its own. But so convinced was the Serbian government of the validity of its genocide claims that when it brought charges against NATO to the International Court of Justice, it argued that the bombing campaign was a violation of the Genocide Convention. The court rejected the argument.

All of this, of course, overlooks what Serbian police and military have been doing to the ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo.

Few people in Serbia grasp the magnitude of what has occurred over the last 10 weeks -- some 1.5 million people driven from their homes; hundreds, perhaps thousands killed. The state-controlled media have not dwelt on their plight. It speaks mainly of the Serbian military campaign against Kosovo Liberation Army "terrorists."

Sovereign states have the right to defend themselves against terrorists and armed separatists. The results are not pretty. Turkey's war against Kurdish separatists comes to mind. But the flood of refugees from Kosovo goes far beyond a crackdown against separatist guerrillas.

The Yugoslav government's official explanation of the 1.5 million refugees and displaced persons is that there were hardly any before the March 24 bombing campaign began. In other words, it was the bombing that caused people to abandon their homes, not the masked thugs who went house to house telling people they had five minutes to leave.

Goran Matic, an influential government minister, tells foreign reporters the whole refugee story is a hoax. He claims that CNN and other television networks paid a few thousand refugees to circulate back and forth across the border in order to make it appear that there was a huge exodus.

"Actually, we know that very few Albanians left," said Matic, who is a member of the Yugoslav United Left party headed by Mira Markovic, Milosevic's wife. It is not wise to dispute his theory.

Even opponents of the regime, politicians like Draskovic, have convinced themselves of the Serbs' innocence in Kosovo.

Draskovic blames the refugee crisis on NATO bombing. He also believes the KLA ordered people to leave in order to create a crisis that could be used against the Serbs.